It’s the birthday of Ellen Raskin (1928-1984, #diedtooyoung), author of The Westing Game (1978), a middle grade murder mystery novel that won the 1979 Newbery Medal and the undying devotion of a bazillion readers, including Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, who rereads the novel once a year. The novel begins, “The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!” Near Sunset Towers is a mansion, and in the mansion lives an eccentric millionaire, and upon his death, 16 people, most of them inhabitants of Sunset Towers, are named his beneficiaries—but only two will inherit. The 16 are paired up and given clues to solve the millionaire’s murder: winners take all.

(Don’t you kind of want to drop everything and read it right now?)

Raskin was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she changed majors from journalism to fine art. After college, she moved to New York City and got a job in a commercial art studio working with other people’s artwork. She eventually became a freelance commercial artist and ultimately illustrated more than 1,000 book jackets, including the original jacket for A Wrinkle in Time.

The first book of her own that Raskin wrote and illustrated was the children’s picture book Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (1966). She wrote another 11 picture books and a total of four novels, one of which, Figgs & Phantoms (1974), was named a Newbery Honor book.

The Westing Game has been called a “deftly perverse post-Bicentennial novel” about rampant greed, deceit, and suspicion, capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1970s. Inspiration for the novel came from several sources: the Bicentennial; the 1976 death of eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes and the ensuring fuss over his will; and Herbert V. Kohler, head of the Kohler Company in Sheboygan, a factory town near Milwaukee that experienced a violent labor strike in the 1950s.

(I cannot help but notice here that exactly zero eccentric millionaires have named me their beneficiary. Well, the day is young.)

Raskin was married twice, divorced once, and had one daughter; she and her second husband, Scientific American editor Dennis Flanagan, lived with Raskin’s daughter and son-in-law in a two-family home. Raskins died at 56 of complications from a connective tissue disease.

Have a gray but acceptable Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.